Sensory maps

Sensory maps depict the world as it is qualitatively experienced, drawing on alternative human sensory modalities to call attention to the more-than-visual sensory characteristics of place. Sensory maps combine aesthetics with empirically sensed datasets to both depict personal, temporally specified realities and to advocate the world as individually constructed. As such many sensory maps are exploratory and artistic in nature. Sensory mapping's roots can be traced to a historical desire to monitor changing urban environmental conditions and to navigational pragmatism. Historical practices that focus on sensed data have led to reforms in public hygiene, the quality of sonic environments, and human-scale urban planning that prioritizes diversity and well-being. Contemporary practitioners, concerned with the emotional, embodied, and affective aspects of cartography, utilize multiple sensory output media in addition to traditional paper and digital forms in order to draw attention to sensed, subjective characteristics and their relationship to place. Where sensory mapping has a pragmatic aim, urban psychogeographic mappings tend toward a political defamiliarization of known environments, drawing attention to emotional and affective powers of the natural, cultural and political. One prime hybrid example is Krygier's Guide Psychogéographique de OWU, the result of an improvised, multisensory project with young students

Invisible, erratic, ephemeral: lives of urban smells

Why the senses matter in my work/research. How I take the senses into account in my work including how I design for sensory experiences. Key methods, as well as challenges, in art and design practice when researching the senses. Challenges of working with urban sensory experience

Practices of smellscape mapping

Traditional paper maps trade in fixities of time and place, boundaries and territories whereas digital mapping affords movement… albeit one of pre-Renaissance where we remain a constant presence at the very centre of our universe. I suggest that there are temporalities invoked by both such mapping practices, especially when it comes to smell. Today I will follow the journey from my earliest smell mapping experiences to show how I got to this position

Smellmap : Amsterdam - olfactory art & smell visualisation

Creating a smellmap of a city is a subjective, collaborative exer-cise. During a series of smellwalks local participants foreground their sense of smell and name perceived aromas emanating from the urban smellscape. Data and conversations arising from the walks are ‘analysed’ and a representative smellscape of the city is visualised as a map. Scents; the nasal stimuli and a catalyst for discussion accompany the map. As a map of what we don’t know, indications of geo-located smell possibilities and ephemeral scents combine visualisation with the olfactory to place the emphasis on human interaction with sensory data to create meaning and an understanding of place

Lives of urban smells

I discuss how the lived experience of smell can be represented by focusing on some of my art and design work. This work seeks to capture the ephemeral and temporal nature of smells in urban environments

Polyrhythmia of the smellwalk: mapping multi-scalar temporalities

Using research through design this project investigates the layers of rhythms experienced during a smellwalk through its subsequent mapping. The multi-scalar temporalities of the smellscape are revealed through conversations, notes, performance, landscape, photographs and the interplay of theory and practice in map creation. This ontogenetic and performative approach to mapping practices suggests future scenarios of olfactory awareness are best contextualised in an ecological, temporo-spatial framework

Sensations of Roman lives: smell profiles of Roman Silchester based on physical proximity

The smells of Roman times as indicated through archaeological site digs were reproduced to generate a consistent scale of hedonic tone and likelihood of smell detection. The resulting graphics were designed to illustrate these two scales on single graphics creating potential for visual modelling of a Roman smellscape

Smellwalk: Edinburgh

Smellwalk through Edinburgh's city street

The sweet smell of Amsterdam … and it's not just cannabis, say odour mappers

Urban smellscape researcher Kate McLean travels the world mapping scents: Edinburgh smells of the brewery and penguin poo, New York’s summer is ripe with garlic and spilled beer, while Amsterdam smells of ... damp